Fellows

Distinguished Fellow For Global Security

John O. Brennan comes to the Center on National Security after 33 years of government service. Most recently he served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. Before becoming Director, Mr. Brennan served at the White House for four years as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Mr. Brennan began his service in government at the CIA, where he worked from 1980 to 2005. He spent most of his early career in the Agency’s main analytic arm, the Directorate of Analysis, specializing in the Near East and South Asia before directing counterterrorism analysis in the early 1990s. In 1994 and 1995 he was the Agency’s intelligence briefer to President Bill Clinton. After an assignment as a Chief of Station in the Middle East, Mr. Brennan served from 1999 to 2001 as Chief of Staff to George Tenet, who was the Director of Central Intelligence. Mr. Brennan next worked as Deputy Executive Director of the CIA until 2003, when he began leading a multi-agency effort to establish the National Counterterrorism Center. In 2004, he became the Center’s Interim Director.

Mr. Brennan graduated from Fordham University in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

Visiting Scholar

David A. Andelman is a veteran foreign correspondent, author and commentator who contributes frequently to CNN on global affairs. A member of the Board of Contributors of USA Today, he served for more than seven years as Editor & Publisher of World Policy Journal. Earlier, he was executive editor of Forbes.com and a domestic and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He then moved to CBS News where he served for seven years as Paris correspondent. There followed service as a Washington correspondent for CNBC, news editor of Bloomberg News and Business Editor of the New York Daily News. In the course of his career he has traveled through and reported from more than 85 countries. He is the author of three books: The Peacemakers, The Fourth World War, and A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist, author, documentary producer and vice president at New America where he directs the International Security and Fellows programs; a professor of practice at Arizona State University; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Peter Bergen is the author of United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists.

Don Borelli is the Chief Operations Officer at The Soufan Group and a 25-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he held high-profile leadership positions, including Assistant Special Agent in Charge in the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). As the Assistant Special Agent in Charge in the New York JTTF, Mr. Borelli also served as the New York International Terrorism Program Manager, where he was responsible for developing strategies to combat the terrorism threat to New York. Mr. Borelli oversaw hundreds of international terrorism investigations, including all extraterritorial investigations in Europe, Canada, and Africa.

Joshua L. Dratel is a New York-based lawyer. Mr. Dratel has been involved in some of the past three decades' most important cases involving national security, terrorism, international law, and civil liberties. Mr. Dratel is co-editor with Karen J. Greenberg of the prize-winning The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (2005), and The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (2008). He is a past President of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2005), as well as Co-Chair of the Amicus Curiae Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Thomas A. Durkin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where he serves as Co-Founder and Co-Director of its National Security and Civil Rights Program. Mr. Durkin has represented a considerable number of defendants in material support cases throughout the country, including United States v. Mohammed Hamzah Khan, No. 14 CR 564, and United States v. Daoud, 755 F.3d 479 (7th Cir., 2014); and presently has cases pending in the Northern District of Illinois, the Southern District of Indiana, the Northern District of Ohio, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the District of Maryland. He was also a member of the ACLU’s John Adams Project which provided civilian defense counsel in the first iteration of the 9/11 conspiracy case in the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Durkin is a recipient of the 2007 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago’s Bill of Rights in Action Award for his work in preserving the Constitution in the representation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Carol Dysinger is an Associate Professor at New York University's Tisch School of Arts. She directed the documentary "Camp Victory, Afghanistan," the first in her trilogy about Afghanistan post 9/11. Prior to directing docs, Prof. Dysinger edited many documentaries and features, and as a screenwriter she co-wrote several scripts for major motion picture studios. Her short films screened widely and won many awards, including the Student Academy Award for Best Dramatic, the Hugo Award. Currently she is an advisor at the Doc Lab at Sundance FIlm Institute -- and runs workshops around the world on hybrid filmmaking. She is the recipient of the David Payne Carter award for excellence in teaching.

Donald Glascoff is a documentary film maker and retired attorney. He has produced three full-length documentaries, including the 2007 Academy Award winning "Taxi To The Dark Side," on which he was the Executive Producer. The major theme of his work is the preservation of human rights and individual liberties. Prior to his film career, Don was a partner and co-chairman of the oldest Wall Street law firm, Cadwalader. He also served as Chairman of the Park Avenue Bank and on the Boards of Renco Metals and Magnesium Corporation of America. Don is the Founder and was Chairman of Oxford University's Programme in Public Interest Law and Policy. In addition to his film career, Don continues to be an active real estate investor. He served the United States Government as a Captain in the Army and Deputy General Council of The Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is a graduate of Yale College and Cornell Law School.

Jonathan Hafetz is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Center for Democracy and a professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law. Mr. Hafetz works on issues involving detention, torture, surveillance, racial and religious discrimination, and the intersection of immigration and national security law. He previously worked as a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project, a litigation director at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, and a John J. Gibbons fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons PC. He has written books on habeas corpus and on international criminal law and authored numerous articles for academic journals and popular publications. Mr. Hafetz served previously as the chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Task Force on National Security and the Rule of Law. He is a graduate of Amherst College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School.

Michel Paradis currently serves as a senior attorney in the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization. In that role, he is regularly appointed to represent detainees held at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has argued numerous cases before the nation’s highest courts and written scholarly publications on the subjects of international humanitarian law, terrorism, and legal theory. He received his bachelor and law degrees from Fordham and his doctorate from Oxford. He teaches courses on the law of war at Georgetown and Columbia Law Schools. He is the author of a forthcoming book on war crimes trials in the Pacific during World War II, due out from Simon & Schuster in 2017.

Nilo Tabrizy is a video journalist at The New York Times, where she works on breaking news and short-form enterprise pieces. Nilo covers international stories, national security and extremism. Prior to this, she worked on live interactive journalism, which featured projects that directly involved the NYT's online audience in original reporting. She is a former producer and correspondent for VICE News, where she covered drug policy, the environment and breaking news. She also produced and edited web videos for NowThis, and produced daily news packages for the United Nations and New York bureaus of Al Jazeera English. She received her Master's of Science from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and her BA in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia

Robert Windrem is an investigative producer and journalist for NBC News. He has worked as a producer for NBC in varying capacities for three decades. His work has focused on issues of international security, strategic policy, intelligence and terrorism. Mr. Windrem is the winner of more than 40 national journalism awards for his work in print, television, and online journalism, including a Columbia-duPont Award; mostly for his work on international security issues.